Spring show at Alice Austen House Museum looks at foreclosures

A home for sale with a dead lawn stands out next to its green neighbor in the Rosetta Canyon development in Lake Elsinore, Calif. in 2008. Photo by Lauren Greenfield.

The F word

WHAT

“Foreclosed: Documents from the American Housing Crisis”

through June 14, 2012

WHERE

Alice Austen House Museum

2 Hylan Blvd., Rosebank

WHEN

Thursday to Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.

HOW MUCH

Suggested admission: $2

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - You buy a house, but you make a home. You sell a house but you lose a home.

The distinction is central to “Foreclosed: Documents from the American Housing Crisis” the spring show at the Alice Austen House Museum in Rosebank

The venue is small but perfect. The house belonged to photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952) who lived to see it slip away after she was ruined in the crash of 1929. She only managed to hang onto “Clear Comfort” as the place was known for years, by borrowing against it.

Eventually the bank foreclosed and sold it to tavern owners in Stapleton. Evicted, the photographer lived in several places for the next few years.

By 1951, Clear Comfort was a dilapidated shadow of its old, genteel self. Austen returned to the dear old homestead that year for an afternoon visit recorded by celebrated Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstadt. She put on a brave face, but it’s easy to see how it pained her to find her old home in such wretched shape.

Forty years later, after a top-to-bottom rehabilitation, Clear Comfort became the Austen House Museum, restored to some semblance of its original charm.

The temperature of “Foreclosed” is cooler, for the most part, than the Eisenstadt photographs. The properties depicted in the photographs symbolize the story; their former owners/occupants are unseen, but perceptible.

Unreal real estate

One of the photographers, Lauren Greenfield, became known for her studies of girls and young women (“Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood” but recently shot a before-and-after set-up in Lake Elsinore California.

We’re looking at identical upscale tract-house specimens side by side. The one with the toasted lawn is a foreclosed casualty; the next-door owner is hanging on, apparently: His/her grass is green.

Nothing about real estate in this Rosetta Canyon development makes sense anymore: According to the caption, the so-called real estate bubble was so inflated that all the houses purchased between 2004 and 2007 are worth less today than what’s still owed on them.

In Florida, another state with a record-setting foreclosure rate, Bruce Gilden photographed Christine Baker, a former homeowner asleep in her new home, her van. Again the caption is crucial. The photograph remains mysterious — guarded —without it.

It isn’t the case with a photograph shot by John Moore on the day that an “eviction team” removed Tracy Munch’s belongings from her house in Adams County.

The photographer is at the front of the house, shooting Munch’s worldly goods, which are jumbled on the lawn. It’s a windy day, she’s moving through the piles of possessions; her long hair obscures her face.

Her story is less dreadful than others, it turns out. She endured eviction, but managed to rent new quarters.

Eventually housing that no one needs or wants become neighborhood eyesores. In Cleveland and other cities, municipal departments can opt to destroy old housing. Photographer Brian Ulrich shot a voracious backhoe in a one-minute video loop devouring old wood-frame houses.

The large, new-looking two story house in Guillaume Zuili’s pastel-toned photograph is so light, it seems to be disappearing. A small insecure-looking figure is visible through the open front door. Clearly, she won’t be able to keep the place from evaporating.

One participant, Imara Moore (an artist in residence at the Austen House this year) combines the symbol — the lost house — with the ho-hum bureaucratic foreclosure process in small photo-and-text composites. Somehow the whole painful scenario seems even worse when you realize it’s driven by reams of rigamarole.